CHAPTER XXI.
In Life, as in Art, the Beautiful moves in curves.
They have dined. George Morley takes the oars, and the boat cuts through the dance of waves flushed by the golden sunset. Beautiful river! which might furnish the English tale-traveller with legends wild as those culled on shores licked by Hydaspes, and sweet as those which Cephisus ever blended with the songs of nightingales and the breath of violets! But what true English poet ever names thee, O Father Thames! without a melodious tribute? And what child ever whiled away summer noons along thy grassy banks, nor hallowed thy remembrance among the fairy days of life?
Silently Lionel bent over the side of the gliding boat, his mind carried back to the same soft stream five years ago. How vast a space in his short existence those five years seemed to fill! And how far, how immeasurably far from the young man, rich in the attributes of wealth, armed with each weapon of distinction, seemed the hour when the boy had groaned aloud, "Fortune is so far, Fame so impossible!" Farther and farther yet than his present worldly station from his past, seemed the image that had first called forth in his breast the dreamy sentiment, which the sternest of us in after-life never utterly forget. Passions rage and vanish, and when all their storms are gone, yea, it may be, at the verge of the very grave, we look back and see like a star the female face, even though it be a child's, that first set us vaguely wondering at the charm in a human presence, at the void in a smile withdrawn! How many of us could recall a Beatrice through the gaps of ruined hope, seen, as by the Florentine, on the earth a guileless infant, in the heavens a spirit glorified! Yes—Laura was an affectation—Beatrice a reality!
George's voice broke somewhat distastefully on Lionel's reverie. "We near our destination, and you have not asked me even the name of the lady to whom you are to render homage. It is Lady Montfort, widow to the last Marquis. You have no doubt heard Mr. Darrell speak of her?"
"Never Mr. Darrell—Colonel Morley often. And in the world I have heard her cited as perhaps the handsomest, and certainly the haughtiest, woman in England."
"Never heard Mr. Darrell mention! that is strange, indeed," said George Morley, catching at Lionel's first words, and unnoticing his after comment. "She was much in his house as a child, shared in his daughter's education."
